[Anonymous / Deleted User]

I work for a small non-profit organization in a downtown area. We manage to do a lot of work with little or no budget. One of the things we do to serve the community is transportation. As you may already know, many poor families run into big problems with transportation. Whether it’s a bad driving record or limited finances, they have trouble getting reliable transportation. There’s no way we could be everyone’s personal taxi service, so we just help get people get to places that are off routine. We are currently communicating with cell phones which is dangerous and expensive.

So, we really need a two way radio setup that communicates with a base station. If we only traveled within a 10 mile radius, this wouldn’t be so hard. However, we typically travel much further and randomly than what could be reached with CB radios (without breaking fcc rules). Even if we could use CB’s there also the question of whether there’s too much radio traffic. We do have reliable LTE everywhere in the city, and we just got a grant to get little LTE hotspots for 10/month/device. You may now see where I’m going with this.

To be more specific, I’m talking about an open-repeater setup in each of our vehicles (two radios, a rasp-pi, easy-digi, usb card, wifi hotspot). I would set everything up to receive power triggered from the ignition switch through the cigarette lighter in a self-contained project box for easy removal. So each vehicle would get a project box (node) and a two-way. I would then setup a node at the main facility.
Is there a way to set this up with open-repeaters with closed-circuit channel?
Is it possible to set them up to auto-login into this closed-circuit channel (for any ignorant person to use)?

If this application is a stretch, is there another solution anyone could think of (without spending too much money)?

[Aaron, N3MBH]

Greetings,
This is out of the scope of OpenRepeater itself, but you might be able to config the SVXLink core to do what you desire. This also seems to be non-ham related, so you would need to be careful what voip services that you use. Obviously Echolink would be out because it requires you to a ham and use a callsign. Also there is a risk with inadvertently connecting into other ham networks. I would encourage you to look at the SVXLink documentation to as I believe it has it’s own voip linking option. You may be able to set it up that and instead of rx and tx radios, substitute a hand mic and speaker. It would take a little work, but it might just work. Hope that helps.

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

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